EvenBalance PB support for ET ended (and consequences)

[Pedro-NF]

This is a copy of my post on the Jaymod forums:

EvenBalance has discontinued support for ET. This means no new PB GUID's will be generated and so new ET installs will have no etkey file and, consequently, no GUID. PBBans has already announced that, without new GUID's, they can't mantain support for ET either, a decision which will certainly be followed by PunksBusted:

http://www.pbbans.com/forums/pb-support ... id__381236

I couldn't care less about EvenBalance's PB cheat checks for ET, as they had already stopped any work on that years ago, but PBBans and PunksBusted support will be missed, since most cheaters are caught by their checks.

My main immediate concern, however, is this: in the Jaymod admin system everything about players - XP's, skills, bans, admin levels, etc. - is associated with their PB GUID's, so what are we supposed to do now that lots of players will simply have NO GUID's? For a long time admins have been asking for some other type of (PB independent) GUID for the mod, but those requests were always systematically denied by Jaybird for this or that reason.

I'm all ears...

http://jaymod.clanfu.org/forums/viewtop ... f=1&t=9567

Thanks to Thane for being alert and bringing this to my attention as soon as he got the news.

[qu4s3n4d4]

I don't know about the stats of the players, but you can use other cheat blocker as TZAC or SLAC...

[Pedro-NF]

I don't know about the stats of the players, but you can use other cheat blocker as TZAC or SLAC...

Cheaters are the least of my concerns right now. Without the etkey file and, consequently, the PB GUID:

1 - PB will of course have to be disabled on all servers, or players without an etkey file/PB GUID won't be able to join.

2 - XP, skills, bans and admin levels are all associated with the PB GUID. It wouldn't be reasonable to allow players who had an etkey file before to keep their XP's etc. while new players or players who reinstall ET without having backed up their etkey files before will have their XP's etc. reset every time they disconnect.

As I see it, there are 2 alternatives:

1 - Jaybird implements a mod specific GUID (which he has systematically refused to do in the past), and adapts the admin system to recognize that GUID instead of the PB GUID. Note that the N!tmod devs had agreed to do this, but ufortunately it seems that N!trox, the main dev, couldn't afford to pay the web site host and even his ISP so the mod's site is currently down (and development stalled). I even posted there about a year ago suggesting that he started accepting donations but he refused it.

2 - Someone who knows the structure of the etkey file writes an "etkey generator". A PB GUID is formed by a sequence of 32 hexadecimal (0 to F) characters. That allows for a HUGE amount of combinations (16 ^ 32) and so the possibility of 2 equal GUID's being generated would be infinitesimal.

[Pedro-NF]

http://www.splashdamage.com/forums/show ... -support!!

[Das Boot]

Maybe now that evenbalance has stopped issuing GUIDs, Jaybird will change his mind. In the meantime, we could direct players without a GUID to create their own using this simple method, which I have tested:

1. Get a new GUID at http://www.guidgenerator.com/online-guid-generator.aspx
2. Create a new text document in your ET main folder using notepad or wordpad.
3. Pasted the GUID in the new document and renamed the document to etkey
4. Remove the .txt at the end of the name so the name becomes etkey instead of etkey.txt
5. Click yes when prompted to allow file change extension.

I was able to join the server with a homemade GUID, and my XP (all 8 of it) was still there when I disconnected and then reconnected.

[Pedro-NF]

It's curious that it worked, because the GUID's that script creates aren't in the PB GUID format. Maybe the local PB server running along the game server generates a valid GUID based on any data it finds in the etkey file. In that case, creating an "etkey file generator" would be much simpler, I could write it myself.

[Das Boot]

I honestly didn't think it was going to work either, but it does seem to. A program might prove useful, especially for noobs.

[Pedro-NF]

To the people at Activision and EvenBalance:

FUCK YOU, YOU GREEDY PIECES OF HUMAN GARBAGE !!!

ACTIVISION: you've been trying for a long time to kill the game you never believed would become THE BEST MULTIPLAYER FPS EVER, and your pathetic later releases failed miserably to cause its popularity any damage. Keep trying, you sore losing bastards!

EVENBALACE: your fucking piece of shit software only worked for as long as you obviously got paid by Activision, then you in practice stopped researching ET cheats. Stop being the hypocrites that you are, giving interviews saying you do what you do for the sake of the gamers community.

BOTH: you'll just have to spend your pathetic little greedy lives watching as ET's community survives AND keeps on growing.

Swallow it, motherfuckers!!!


Pedro Guilherme Teixeira Corbett (Pedro-NF)

[Pedro-NF]

I was starting to write a little program to create an etkey file but someone already wrote a script for that.

From schnoog's post on the Splash Damage forums:

"As an immediate measure I started up the site http://etkey.org which allows to get a unique ETKEY
The design is very very beta But it works at least for server not configured to ban GUIDs not reached a minimum age"

http://www.splashdamage.com/forums/show ... post380784

[Pedro-NF]

Our very own [>NF<] ETKEY Generator v1.01 may be download from the server's site at

http://www.noobsforever.net

[Pedro-NF]

If you to need update PB from any version to the latest version released for ET, download the file with the updaters for all OS's from one of the sites below and copy the pb folder contained in it over the pb folder in the game's installation directory. The updates and the PB services installation will happen automatically the first time you connect to a PB enabled server:

http://www.noobsforever.net

http://en.portaldosgames.com

[Pedro-NF]

I need translations to Spanish, German, Dutch, French, Italian, Greek, Polish and Russian for the following phrases:

PunkBuster update files

Copy the PB folder from this file to the game's installation directory, overwriting the existing folder

ETKEY file generator

Copy the generated ETKEY file to the ETMAIN folder in the game's installation directory


If you speak one of those languages, send me the translations by PM or email.

[Pedro-NF]

A few clarifications about the current state of cheat checking on the server. The fact that (UN)EvenBalance's PunkBuster support for ET ended does not interfere with our cheat checks, because it's been years since EvenBalance added any cheat checks to ET. All cheat checks that have actually worked in the past years were provided by the two major anti cheating communities, PBBans and PunksBusted.

Along with every PB enabled ET server runs a local PB server (that is, on the same host as the ET server), and the local PB server running along the [>NF<] Server continues to check cheats based on the checks provided by PBBans and PunksBusted, using the local PB server tools. The only real change is that PunksBusted stopped receiving streaming ban information from ET servers, so a player banned on an ET server may join another one instantly, while previously servers streaming to PunksBusted would propagate that ban and the cheater would be unable to join other servers that also streamed to PunksBusted (unless, of course, he created a new etkey/PB GUID).

PBBans, which were always more commited to ET and have always offered a better service overall, continue to receive ET server streaming information, although I'm not certain if they are propagating the bans to all ET servers in their network. One of the PBBans admins posted on their forums that they were (like everyone else) awaiting the implementation that Splash Damage (ET's developers) announced they were going to make to address the unique GUID issue. You gotta be a fan of Splash Damage's - they developed the best multiplayer FPS ever, the game is free, is 8 years old, and they are still commited to it and its player base.

So, in a nutshell, all cheat checks that were running before are still running, but the cheat detections that happen on a server are not being distributed to other servers that streamed to the anti cheating networks. Bans are being enforced locally by each server individually, where the cheaters were caught.

[beyond23]

if you are looking for creating GUIDs Online i will suggest use this site, http://www.freepasswordsgenerator.com/guid-generator - it lets you create random and unique better then most of the available online

[Pedro-NF]

if you are looking for creating GUIDs Online i will suggest use this site, http://www.freepasswordsgenerator.com/guid-generator - it lets you create random and unique better then most of the available online

You don't create the GUIDs, you create an etkey file with a specific format and the game computes the player's GUID based on the data on that file. I wrote my own program that generates etkey files because I didn't like the way other people's programs were creating them. You can download it from our main site at http://www.noobsforever.net.